That's a fair point about sequencing, but it actually reinforces the argument rather than undermining it. If Anthropic pushed back internally, and that pushback is what led to the directive going public, then Anthropic had every reason to anticipate that this would become a public story. Which means the blog post wasn't a spontaneous act of transparency, it was a prepared response to a foreseeable escalation. That's more strategic rather than less so.
Internal pushback and public damage control aren't mutually exclusive. A company can genuinely disagree with a client's demands behind closed doors and simultaneously craft a public narrative designed to make itself look as good as possible once those disagreements surface. In fact, that's exactly what competent communications teams do, they plan for the scenario where private disputes become public, and they have messaging ready.
The real question isn't who went public first or why. It's whether Anthropic's stated position, "we support these military use cases but not those ones", reflects a durable ethical framework or a line drawn precisely where it needed to be to keep both the contracts and the brand intact. Nothing in the sequencing you've described answers that question. It just tells us Anthropic saw this coming, which, if anything, means the messaging was more carefully engineered, not less.